Opening Ontario’s grid to innovation means reaching out to the world

Note: This blog was co-written with Jon Dogterom, the Cleantech Practice Lead at MaRS.

Last week, the MaRS Future of Energy summit took on a big challenge: how do we position Ontario to have a shot at global leadership in the emerging smart grid market? The world will spend trillions over the next couple of decades on smart energy networking, sensors, communications, energy storage, automated demand response, self-healing grids, and so on. We’ve got a strong networking history and talent. Now we need to work with Ontario’s regulators, utilities and large corporations to leverage our grid as an asset. If we do it right, we’ll soon be selling smart grid technology into an enormous global market.

The Ontario Green Energy and Green Economy Act can turbo-charge our chances of success in the export market. It’s put lots of wind and solar power on the grid, which some don’t like – it can make the grid unstable and is a pain to manage. But good engineers are paid to avoid that instability! And that’s precisely where the opportunity lies. We can view these hot spots as problems to solve, and use our solutions to refine the expertise and technology that we’ll soon be exporting to the rest of the world.

But we don’t just need new technology: regulatory and financial innovations are also part of the puzzle, and were a big part of the discussion last week. How do we build a rational market that encourages the adoption of new technology, protects the rate payer and brings stability to a changing grid?

Opening our grid to clean energy was a risk. Opening it further to innovation is another. But it’s a risk we need to take, and MaRS is taking the lead on making sure that all the stakeholders are heard.

Tom Rand

Tom leads MaRS’ role in the Canadian cleantech ecosystem and works with our Advisory Services group to support our growing portfolio of cleantech ventures. See more…